RIP Ultimate Warrior

I don't even think it's the weirdest Twitter-related news story this week. That goes to the bass player from R.E.M. breaking Letterman's retirement.

 

They were both celebrities I didn't know were celebrities until they died.

I'm still waiting for the third one.

 

Already happened. ...
John Pinette.

 

I'm pretty sure it was impossible to grow up in the late '80s-early '90s and NOT know who the Ultimate Warrior was.

 

By the way .... Abe Vigoda. ....

 

I'm guessing he was probably the third most popular wrestler during that time, behind only Hogan and Savage.

 

At his peak, Warrior was bigger than Hogan or Savage. His peak didn't last very long, though. I'd say 15 months, tops.

 

Nobody was bigger than Hogan. He was it. It. The Guy.

Everyone else was so far behind that its yesterday.

I started watching in '83, as the Hulkster emerged. It all began when he beat the Iron Sheik for the belt.

That being said, if there's a All Star team for that era -- the era from '83 to '90 or so -- in terms of sheer magnitude of popularity, it would be:

Hulk Hogan

Macho Man
Superfly Snuka
Ultimate Warrior
Rowdy Roddy Piper
Andre the Giant

Bret Hart
Junkyard Dog
Greg the Hammer Valentine
Big John Studd
Davis Schultz
Tito Santana

Others joined the pantheon, some dropped out between those years. I stopped watching in '90 or '91.

 

Warrior was. Not for long, but he was bigger than Hulk at one point.

 

The only wrestlers who had peaks higher than Warrior's were Hogan, Austin, Rock, and Goldberg.

Warrior was the biggest thing in wrestling by 1990, and was at the time the only guy who ever beat Hogan at Wrestlemania. That was a huge deal.

 

OK, I'll accept as a passing-of-the-torch sort of thing.

I just see it as this: the WWF became what it became because of Hulk. But the time the Ultimate Warrior came around its popularity was astronomical. So yeah, at some point SOMEone was going to replace Hulk as the It-guy. I was leaving the WWF and wrestling in general at the same time the Ultimate Warrior was becoming massive so I missed his peak.

I'll take your word that he was AS big as Hulk. But BIGGER than Hulk? Not sure that's possible. Hulk Hogan is the reason the WWF got so big, so massive, so popular, so fast before the game morphed in the '90s and 2000s and now 20-10s.

 

In terms of being The Guy, that was Hogan from '84 through '93 in the WWF. But there were a plethora of guys who were No. 2, who arguably, we're just as popular among wrestling fans, but didn't have the same appeal among the mainstream, except for Andre the Giant, who, by the mid-80s, was being deemphasized.

'83-84: Snuka
'85: Junkyard Dog
86 to part of 87: Piper
End of '87- start of '89: Savage
Middle of '89 to middle of '91: Warrior
1992: Hart